Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity

PART I

TRIPLE OVERTURE

CHAPTER 1

DANGEROUS GOOD WORDS

Spirit and authenticity are word concepts that cannot be saved from their own pathos. Perhaps we should not even try to sober them up. The impression they leave is clear enough. As in paintings from earlier centuries that do not disdain the language of gesture, where the figures portrayed point upward to a cynosure even as it is about to be taken from sight, so spirit marks that vanishing point; while authenticity evokes something more solid and steady, more in-itself than transcendent. Like integrity, it suggests an earthy quintessence, firmly local, and with a constancy that, in Shakespeare’s words, will not bend with the remover to remove.

Both qualities express dissatisfaction with the human condition, either by attempting to rise above it (spirit) or to be more fully of it (authenticity). What will convince us that we are real, or that our being here has a reason? That we can infuse existence with an authentic or spiritual rather than contrived and self-deceiving purpose? The dramas in which we are enmeshed, whether at home or in the public sphere; the sense, often, that life is somewhere else (over there—/Behind the shelf/The Sexton keeps the key to—¹); that personal autonomy is a sham and some great endeavor is needed to justify our life: Such feelings come on more strongly when the previous generation has passed through a cataclysmic historical event. The burden of such an event is transmitted in conscious or unconscious form to the third generation and beyond. Not necessarily as a curse (the dark legacy of genocide, for instance) but as a haunting, ambiguous sense of living in the aftermath, of having missed a fateful, defining moment.

A canon or authoritative tradition is, in this light, the active residue of such moments. It remains somewhat abstract, though, a merely suggestive set of themes and molds, an intriguing subject for imaginative exploration that helps to articulate thoughts and feelings and prepares the inexperienced for what may come. Nothing, of course, can fully immunize us to what life will bring. And should catastrophe or crisis supervene, earlier forms of containment are often sorely tested, if not shattered. So Jean-François Lyotard has said that the Holocaust is like an earthquake whose force destroyed the seismic instruments.

The records gathered under the name of science, history, or art nonetheless remind us of what has survived previous tremors. Even in the absence of a personally experienced tremendum (whether catastrophe or ecstasy), these survivals challenge the imagination: There is no need to undergo a renewed violent testing to prove that humanity has confronted what threatens to exceed its capacity or understanding. Other survivals, too, supplement canonical tradition or even challenge its relevance. For while the modern diaspora is characterized by extreme social mobility, especially in North America, so that it is not unusual to find someone in a family with illiterate grandparents who has become an artist, intellectual, or articulate professional, the eventual result is a rediscovery of roots, of a grounding genealogy. Old photos, in this context, often seem like icons or sacred relics: not only images of authenticity but authentic images.

Through oral history, moreover, now systematically pursued, there is an attempt to honor the life stories of ancestors who bear on their faces and in their demeanor the travails of the past and appear to be close to their traditions and even the soil they once cultivated. The American ethos of total assimilation, the so-called melting-pot pattern of acculturation, is questioned by these contrary strains. A multiculturalism emerges that seeks an alternate theory, one that would respect rather than neutralize dissimilar ways of life.

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Concerning authenticity, in particular, it has often been observed that words themselves, however needful in expressing or sustaining such ideals, also subvert them. The words evoked too often and explicitly become jargon. Theodore Adorno, in Germany, criticized Martin Heidegger’s jargon of authenticity, and Kenneth Burke, in America, talked skeptically of god-terms. (Burke cites the oratory of a politician who modulated effortlessly from gold to God.) There is a temptation to use these charged phrases for trivial or masked purposes. Except for spiritual itself, authentic may be the most inauthentic word around.

The authentic person should not have to trumpet identity statements attesting to genealogy, background, faith, integrity, public achievement. One gets tired hearing politicians vaunt their birthplace, their roots (the more folksy the better), their undiminished belief in human goodness and the country’s destiny—while lambasting the decadence and corruption around them. Nor does being an intellectual and qualifying one’s opinions help: Most people seem to go for the rah-rah, give-them-hell orator, not because they necessarily trust such rhetoric but because they trust intellectual politics still less. (Politics should be fun: Although nothing changes, everything can be challenged.) We know too well, moreover, that ideas in the hands of ideologues kill.

Two barely compatible images connect speech and character. There is the quiet, even taciturn person, solid as rock, a doer who gets things done by an inner and unostentatious strength. We are impressed by signs of a tacit knowledge, a prereflective (or postreflective?) understanding. But we also applaud charismatic leaders whose eloquence persuades people that destiny is on their side and everything can be changed for the better, even transformed into a new order. In both leader types their word is their bond, but in the first the words are few, and a sense of dignity, of power in reserve, is what actually persuades; in the other, the words are many and seem to flow from the manifest destiny the speaker proclaims.

Very rarely, of course, does political theater (or any other kind) exhibit so sharply these contrasting types. Most clashes, moreover, in democratic, TV-fueled elections, rely on personal showmanship and deceptive or highly selective ads. But there can be no political contest without a judgment of character that turns on whose word is good. Who is credible and how do we estimate the promissory notes called words? The record is never entirely self-evident: Actions have to be brought forward, reassessed; they are vulnerable, then, to insinuation or misrepresentation. Nor, since voting means anticipating the future—luckily, in democracies, only a delimited portion of it, usually from two to five years—can past behavior stand as a total guarantee.² Future actions are not to be deduced entirely from a person’s worldly success or failure, because the goddess Fortuna or some other quirky factor may intervene. The resilience of the reformed (born again) sinner-politician is the wild card in many a political contest.

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Literature plays out the dilemmas just sketched at every level of existence, not only the political. You might immediately object that play is the operative phrase and that, in the political arena, however much of a show is put on, the clock is ticking, so that a vicarious, playful exemplification has no place. I am sure that is too fatalistic a view of politics and too slighting a view of art. Besides, time in art is often put into play as timing: Fiction has to rouse and resolve suspense, for example, and tries not to cheapen the process of discovery by excessive foreshadowing. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was motivated to write his famous book Homo Ludens (about the play element in culture) in part because he saw how Nazism was removing serious play from politics and substituting a totally controlled, ritualistic spectacle. Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich, writes in 1934 about the Nazi regime: Everything is prefabricated, arranged in advance, dissimulated (Alles gestellt, alles bestellt, alles verstellt).³

The relation between play and reality affects all of life. It is not just a temporary factor in growing up. As D. W. Winnicott has shown, it shapes mature decision making and the well being of individuals and polities. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the reason must have been an ability both to fight and to play, to flexibly leave and reenter a safe transitional space that allows for growth, speculation, imaginative options.⁴

Our civic culture too is directly dependent on tolerating close calls, peacefully negotiating rules, and mocking powerful pretensions. It is a sad mistake to relegate art to the expendable margins of schooling or public priorities. The German poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller argued at length for what he called aesthetic education as an extension of the play instinct and a distinct phase in humanity’s progress toward removing a twofold dependency: one that comes from above as well as from below, from coercive ideologies as well as from instinctual drives.⁵ Yet Schiller knew that the autonomy enabling the freedom of individual or nation was an ideal, that personal and political liberty would never be attained once and for all through the intermediate development of an aesthetic sensibility. As art produces permanent transitional objects, so the concept of aesthetic education suggests not so much an end state or utopia as its continual re-envisioning.

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I do not intend to offer a systematic defense of art. In fact, I sometimes wonder what claim still can be made for its contribution to authentic existence. For the complicity of art in the realities of its time, a complicity that has become the dominant theme of contemporary criticism, makes it harder to look beyond a demystification that justifies it only as an instrument involved in the social or political struggle. Although this view does not inevitably condemn authors who are not overtly engaged, it insists on uncovering their political unconscious. But would we bother with art if it were unable to encourage some ideality or imaginative license? Obversely, and despite appearances to the contrary, the nervous realism of the news channels, always trying to be ahead of the curve, is no less fallible than the predictive potential of art. The entrails of the fish have become cold in the wind, Ingeborg Bachmann writes, anticipating hard times and hardened sensibilities. Throw them back into the sea.⁶ There is no history: only the weather, we read in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound—though he immediately leavens the prosaic dictum with lyric evocations of that weather.

Valued only as exemplary fodder for the politically savvy mind, many works would have to be dismissed as morally inauthentic, a self-deluding species of consciousness or a counterfeit promesse de bonheur. Purely realistic social portraiture, moreover—its intoxication with disintoxication, with the desolation of reality mimicked by extreme performers of the movie or popular music industry—easily succumbs to caricature or cathartic entertainment, to a competitive marketing of its power to shock or shame.

Literary theory, despite present trends, need not accept a reductive view of the relation between art and politics. It should keep the use and abuse of speech, the justness and scrutinizing power of words as well as their deceitful or deceptive character, constantly in mind. It can recall how thought is deeply, and not always consciously, verbal, how the common tender of words enters every aspect of culture. Here and there a significant book refounds language: That glimmers again, the crust of accretions is subverted, each word carries a depth charge. A negotiation occurs between Keats’s all the dead whose names are in our lips and Rilke’s challenge to taste the fruit as well as the name by letting inadequate voicings melt away: Is your mouth, at last, slowly losing all its namings?

Most of the time, unfortunately, we remain unaware of the lava of petrified metaphors that constitutes so much of daily language. Perhaps because words on the page, although meant for thoughtful absorption and reconsideration, must always reenter the pressured marketplace of ideas: chaotic debates where force of personality is often decisive. Too much air or constant public exposure asphyxiates those words, so they become fish gasping on the strand. In literature they refresh and move as quick as in the sea.

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Let me turn to what may seem to be an entirely different and nonpolitical issue: the link between authenticity and attribution. Correct attribution, the standard of authenticity for connoisseurship in the pictorial and occasionally the other arts, is important where there is a distinction between master and disciple in a workshop setting or where anonymity and historical distance have made authorship uncertain. Authenticity through authentification becomes an essential ingredient of value, although primarily of market value.

More crucial, however, is another motive for authentification: the fear of being taken in by a counterfeit or the work of a lesser hand; and this betrays an uncertainty about the internal features of valuation. The identity of the artist matters as a guarantee of a direct correspondence between the mind of the maker and the attributed work. As if divine truth or the expulsion of any kind of treachery or trickery from so high a sphere were at stake, we want no shadow falling between maker and artifact, nothing that might resemble the hand of demiurge, forger, or printer’s devil.

Jane Tompkins, whose memoir I comment on in chapter 4, goes wrong in one respect.⁷ Her attack on the New Criticism (an influential mode of literary study from the 1930s into the 1960s) is simplistic. The movement did indeed reject the bearing of canned historical knowledge on the understanding or valuation of the work of art and denounced certain notorious fallacies (genetic, intentional, affective) commonly used to determine artistic meaning. But this purism was not caused, as she claims, by a wish to remain within a life-distancing, aesthetic realm. Rather, the scholar-teachers associated with the movement felt that students were unable to cope with an increasing information load threatening to replace the textual integrity or immanent qualities of the literary work. The very sense of fraudulence that invades Tompkins the teacher is also what the New Critics sought to prevent by freeing art from false standards of appreciation. Whether they succeeded in finding internal criteria of authenticity is another issue.

The struggle of the individual against inauthenticity leads to a distinct increase in autobiographical reflection. A memoir like that of Tompkins strives for transparency. It presumes a convergence, even coincidence, of first-person narrator and the self being portrayed. Authenticity through sincerity (a kind of self-authentification) is certainly a powerful motive. But the new biographical culture, in which life stories like Tompkins’s participate, is also prompted, not always consciously, by the wish to find a less intellectualized probity, one more in touch with a people source and retrievable through a reflection that bends back to toiler and folk